Personally I think it’d be interesting to see this per capita, so here’s my back of a napkin math for data centers per 1 million pop (c. 2022):
NL - 16.78
US - 16.15
AU - 11.72
CA - 8.63
GB - 7.68
DE - 6.22
FR - 4.63
JP - 1.75
RU - 1.74
CN - 0.32
Worth noting of course that this only lists the quantity of discrete data centers and says nothing about the capacity of those data centers. I think it’d be really interesting to break down total compute power and total storage by country and by population.
I’d also be interested to know what qualifies as a “data center”? For example, are ASIC based crypto mining operations counted, even though their machinery cannot be repurposed to any other function? That would certainly account for a chunk of the the US (almost all of it in Texas).
Yeah, that’s the proper way to think about it. And honestly, it should be servers or racks per capita (i.e. some standard unit), not just “datacenters,” since those can be of varying size.
I would really want a measure of actual compute power, like teraflops per capita or something. Still imperfect, but better than just counting the number of buildings.
I think it is was supposed to come across as anti American not beneficial. People have been knocking data centers for their overuse of energy, thereby trying to say the U.S. is using mass amounts of energy. They just wanted to make a chart that showed the U.S. having way more of these “problem facilities” without any more thorough information.
Personally I think it’d be interesting to see this per capita, so here’s my back of a napkin math for data centers per 1 million pop (c. 2022):
Worth noting of course that this only lists the quantity of discrete data centers and says nothing about the capacity of those data centers. I think it’d be really interesting to break down total compute power and total storage by country and by population.
I’d also be interested to know what qualifies as a “data center”? For example, are ASIC based crypto mining operations counted, even though their machinery cannot be repurposed to any other function? That would certainly account for a chunk of the the US (almost all of it in Texas).
Yeah, that’s the proper way to think about it. And honestly, it should be servers or racks per capita (i.e. some standard unit), not just “datacenters,” since those can be of varying size.
I would really want a measure of actual compute power, like teraflops per capita or something. Still imperfect, but better than just counting the number of buildings.
Yeah, almost any metric is more useful than this one, and I’m an American who “benefits” from this stat.
I think it is was supposed to come across as anti American not beneficial. People have been knocking data centers for their overuse of energy, thereby trying to say the U.S. is using mass amounts of energy. They just wanted to make a chart that showed the U.S. having way more of these “problem facilities” without any more thorough information.
https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/
OK, interesting. I’m a little unclear on how they’re calculating rMax and rPeak though?